


Red

by kittensalad



Category: Once Upon a Time (In Space) - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Adventure, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Injury Recovery, Violence, Violence!, also canon-typical amounts of violence done unto Jonny, and violence!, canon-typical amounts of jonny, i guess??, incredibly punny worldbuilding, maybe???, probably ooc for like. everyone, sorry not sorry goblin man
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:35:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26941504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittensalad/pseuds/kittensalad
Summary: Briar Rose was expecting a prince. What she gets instead is, well. Jonny D'Ville.
Relationships: Briar Rose & Jonny d'Ville, Cinders/Rose (Once Upon A Time In Space)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 67





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hi mechs fandom 👋  
> i just think that rose and jonny should be friends

Rose remembers it. Remembers the feeling of moss underneath her palms, the chill of white gold on her ring finger, the feel of her wife's warm hand on her own. She also remembers the gunfire. The sound of Cole's soldiers cackling as they murdered and raped and plundered. The look in her sister's eyes as bullets punctured her skin and bayonets tore away her muscle.

The color of Cinders' blood on the white tablecloths. On the white icing of the wedding cake. On Rose's own white bridal gown.

And Rose is filled with rage enough for an entire battalion.

Rose knows, though, that these memories don’t belong to her. That she isn’t the original Rose. She was born in a test tube, synthesized out of strands of Rose Red DNA, risen from the fluorescent blue incubation goop to serve the wicked King Cole as a walking, talking weapon.

She tries to inhibit her anger, tries to stuff it down under layers of denial and a deep, dreamless sleep. She knows that the boiling of her blood just feeds the machines that have been wired into her nerves, knows the furrow of her brow a firing signal. She feels the throbbing of the tubes running into her arteries and spinal column as they try to leech any trace of malice they can scavenge from her. She feels the electricity as it weaves through the soft mush of her brain, searching for what she’s hidden away in the darkest depths of herself.

Rose had always been told that princes came for maidens in distress. Rose herself was far from a maiden, but she thought her distress enough to make up for it. So she wished. She wished in every controlled muscle, every hijacked nerve, every pirated cell in her measly little cloned body that someone, anyone, would save her. Save her from her ceaseless slumber inside the blood-soaked incubation chamber at the center of Cole's isolated defense grid.

The glass shattered with a deafening crack. Rose's entire world split apart. The fluid she had been suspended in bucketed onto the red-stained metal floor, covering everything in a sticky residue not unlike soap scum. She collapsed, naked, emaciated, coughing up alternating mouthfuls of vomit and blood as wires, tubes and cords tore out of her flesh and took large chunks of it with them.

She was free. Disconnected. _Saved._

Rose lay there, on the cold floor of the central chamber, soaking wet and chilled to the bone, and she just _stared_. Gazed at the blank, sterile ceiling as her eyes adjusted to the piercing brightness of reality. Of consciousness.

She didn’t know how long she was still. Time had no meaning to her, and the passing of it was foreign. Could’ve been hours. Could’ve been a matter of seconds. She eventually noticed that (most of) the blood, guts and gore littering the control room did not belong to her. That everything was covered in _bodies_. Corpses. Corpses that wore the uniform of King Cole's heartless army.

She would have screamed at the sight of those who took everything from her, from Rose, the original one, but she couldn’t remember where her mouth was, or how it worked. How a tongue formed words and a voice box expelled them. She couldn’t even sit up.

“Hello, Princess!”

It's loud. Piercing. Relatively sing-song. And it is the first voice she has heard in _decades_.

It belongs to her prince.

“Have a good nap? Slept in long enough?”

Her prince is a short man with a wild grin and wilder hair. His eyes are manic, bloodshot and bloodthirsty, and he is drenched in that same blood as well. His hair is matted with it and his torn shirt is dyed an even darker shade of black. He has a hole punched into his trachea from which a sickly colored, chunky liquid oozes and is skewered from stomach to spine on three separate bayonets, one of which a hand is still attached.

But there he stands, smiling down at her with teeth that are too white. He didn’t seem like a man to brush his teeth, Rose thought. She expected crooked stumps sticky with black rot and chewing tobacco. Rose tried to say something, but all that came out was a gurgle and a loll of her tongue.

“Ah, that so?” The man made a wide gesture with a hand missing a few fingers. “Nastya! Lend our poor, naked sleeping beauty your coat!”

Rose heard the piercing clack of boot heels on the steel control room floor, and suddenly a woman was standing over her as well. A woman with wispy brown hair and cracked square glasses. The coat in question, a thick black woolen thing, had only one sleeve; Rose then noticed that it was not a fashion choice but rather because this woman, Nastya, had only one arm. It was reduced to a greying, bloodied stump from which her shoulder joint protruded as the ruined muscles around it flexed and seized, flicking around droplets of strangely silver blood and bone flecks. She didn’t seem fazed.

Nastya muttered something, breathy and in a coarse language Rose didn’t know, before stripping off the coat without even a wince and laying it over Rose's soggy, weak body, as though tucking a child into bed.

As though covering a corpse.

Rose almost could've sworn, watching her bend down with wide, terrified eyes, that the open wound around her rotor cuff began to pulse, and the bone that jutted from it like a gnarled tree branch grew a little bit longer. That the stringy muscle fibers reached down like roots and gripped the shattered bone, repairing themselves, just a little bit. But that was impossible.

“Happy now? Feeling like Princess Charming, Nastya?” the wild-looking man teased, producing a zippo from somewhere and lighting a thin cigarette rolled of black paper. As Rose's leaking eyes turned back to him, she noticed he had a full hand of fingers, and the hole in his throat was now just a closing scab. “So you're our precious Rosie, eh? You look exactly how I expected.”

Rose coughs, the last of that wretched goop expelling itself from her stomach and oozing down her face. She can feel the wounds in her flesh beginning to stick to the ground as they clot. She can _feel._ It's so foreign to her that she can’t even process the amount of pain she's in. She feels like she’s floating, drifting in a sea of agony and ecstasy at simply knowing she’s alive. That she’s free from that wretched machine.

“Jonny. We really don’t have time for a cigarette break right now,” the woman, Nastya, says, her brow furrowed and jaw set tight. She goes to check her watch, but promptly realizes that she doesn’t have one. She doesn’t even have the arm to wear one on.

The man grumbles, more of a salivated growl, and _touches Rose._ Touch. No. No, no, no. Every cell in her body screams, begs for him to lay her body back on the cold, familiar steel of the control room, but all she can manage is to flail her newborn limbs and gurgle in the back of her disused esophagus. She can’t process anything, the white lights, the horrid beeping of the alarm, the chunks of herself now displaced, _the burning hot feeling of her horrible savior's fingers on her back, peeling her open, bloody skin from the metal like she is something to be flayed. Something to be extracted, removed._

And by God has she been removed.

Rose can’t see anything. She can’t see _everything_ , at once, feeding into her, the living heart of the machine constantly being drip fed information. Cole's most expansive mechanical mind, replaced with a lump of spongy, wet, meat. Millions of cameras, watching every corner and nook and cranny of the kingdom, taking in everything, seeing _all_ , now nothing but two insufferably human eyes. Feelings. Feelings that aren’t intricately entwined to hair-triggered guns and lasers, orders for battalions to depart, bombs to be dropped. _She has lost so much. So much of her was torn away in an instant._

She longs to be reconnected, aches to be whole, like a beached fish to water. But at the same time, she's finally free. Rescued. _Alive_. It's a bittersweet freedom.

Rose's thought processes cease completely when Jonny hauls her limp, sticky body over his shoulder. Every nerve in her body fires at once, every muscle tenses, every primal Rose Red instinct programmed into her goes _wild_.

She doesn’t think. She can’t think. She reaches down and grabs the hilt of one of the bayonets skewering Jonny. It hurts, to reach down, to grab. It's so ridiculously painful to even flex her hand that she feels tears well up in her eyes. She barely comprehends what movement even _is,_ but the soldier's DNA inserted into every nuclei of every cell in her body doesn’t need her to comprehend it. It just needs her to do it.

Rose wrenches the blade out of the man's stomach with a horrible squelch. She cries out as her atrophied muscles flame. Then she slams it back in with all the force she can muster. She does it again. And again. And again. She must’ve punctured his stomach, as blood and sickly colored bile begin pooling on the floor in a bubbly mess. He's laughing, but Rose doesn’t hear it. Her ears are full of something else, full of _kill him kill him kill him._ His intestines pour out of his torn gut and he laughs harder. Rose begins to scream, screams her throat bloody. _Jonny is positively ecstatic_.

Rose is hit with something. Something hard, cold. Metal. Right to the back of her skull. She doesn’t have time to recognize it as a titanium pipe wrench before black stars cloud her vision and her mind fills with impermeable fog.

“You should probably pull those out,” Nastya says, gesturing to the bayonets still protruding from Jonny's ruined torso with the head of the wrench. Her arm has regrown back to the elbow, now.

“Was thinking about keeping 'em. Y'know, as a souvenir,” Jonny replies, mouth gargling blood, red spilling through his teeth. He shifts Rose's body onto the other shoulder, but she barely notices, tongue and eyes lolling wetly back and forth as she sways.

Nastya gives him a Look.

“What? Illegal body modification happens all the time. It'll be just like that.”

“Jonny, this isn’t like getting a weaponized prosthetic. This is knives. In your stomach.” Nastya glances down at her arm; the tendons are stretching over the new, pristinely white bones of her hand like creeper vines latching onto a tree.

Jonny gives her the cheesiest smile. “It’ll make projectile vomiting a whole lot funnier…?”

Rose feels her consciousness fading, her already small self growing smaller and smaller, like she is a light on the brink of being snuffed out.

“Take them out before I take them out for you.”

“Ugh, fine,” -- the sound of metal on meat, and something relatively large and fleshy hitting the floor with a moist _thud_ – “Fuck you, Nastya.”

And Rose is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jonny and the Toy Soldier give Rose drugs in a shopping cart. Plus shitty worldbuilding, frog discourse, and five of Jonny's teeth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didnt even re read this after writing it so there will probably be edits. bad and punny worldbuilding ahoy.

For the longest time, Rose floats. It's a relief, all the horrid weight of reality no longer pushing down on her, a constant hurt. The cool darkness is like a salve on her wounds, on the fire in her head.

She floats, and floats, and floats. Drifts in a deep black tide, a familiar ebb and flow of induced unconsciousness.

Until she isn’t floating anymore, she's standing on legs that don’t bow out underneath her, can support her without sending excruciating shocks up her spine. She wiggles her fingers, an experiment: no pain. Looks down. Around her feet is the laced hem of a white dress, skimming just above grass that is too green, must be turf.

There is a pair of black leather dress shoes at the edge of her vision. They step closer, closer, until the pointed toes are even with Rose's own.

 _“My love,”_ the dress shoes say. _“My beautiful, beautiful Rose.”_

A smile tugs at Rose's mouth, cheeks flushing; she can’t help it. _It's been so long_ _since she’s heard that voice._ Tears wobble, threaten to fall from her eyes.

_“Don’t be shy. Look at me.”_

Rose looks up, the biggest grin on her lips. _'I love you so much,’_ she goes to say, takes the breath to say it. Doesn’t get to, though.

Cinders has been shot. Half her face has been blown away, skull shattered, brain exposed, flaps of skin peeling away as her what’s left of her face contorts and writhes in a mix of horror and pain. Her one remaining eye, bloodshot and nary popping from its ruined socket, focuses on Rose's face with unnerving clarity.

Cinders' teeth part, clack against each other. Dark blood, almost black, oozes from her mouth and down the front of her shirt, falling and staining the turf a horrible brown.

_“You’re not my Rose.”_

Gunfire. Cinders jerks, shot again. Blood spatters against Rose's dress, a pattern of red gore against dainty embroidered flowers. She gets shot again, and again, and again and again and again and _again_. She careens into Rose's chest, mangled body nothing but a twitching mass of raw flesh and iron. Rose is now sodden with her wife's blood.

She falls to her knees on the sticky, soaked turf, dragging Cinders down with her. Wraps her arms around the convulsing, dying mess of the woman she adores, presses her face against it, a ghostly semblance of embrace.

“I love you so much,” Rose finally whispers to the bloody red heap in her lap.

Cinders doesn’t hear it. She's already dead.

><

When Rose wakes, she is _somewhere_. It's noisy, damp, uncomfortable, and noisy. Her eyelashes are stuck together with day-old tears and her head aches something awful. There's an unfamiliar chill in her bones and the raw wounds in her skin throb rhythmically. She feels wind on her cheeks, and something rattles metallically in her ears.

“Jonny, what's a painkiller?”

“It's drugs, Toy Soldier.”

“But how does it kill pain? Does it shoot pain with a little gun? Is pain alive? Can I meet it? Can I take drugs?”

“Uh… Yes to all? Probably?”

“Don’t give it any ideas.”

“Oh, can I do it? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?”

“Sure. Just jab it in wherever. Try not to kill her.”

“Jonny, I don’t think this is a good—”

Pain. Rose's newly-conscious body jerks forward as though winded, red heat rapidly spreading through her arm. Her eyelids tear themselves open and sting even against faint light. Rose's ingrained instincts assess the situation as they would a threat.

It's dark. Immediately above her are rows of fluorescent lights, flickering weakly, air conditioners dripping with condensation; between them she can see stars, but as her eyes focus, she notices the false atmosphere, foundation towers stretching into the sky, holding the dome, the barrier between them and harrowing gravitational pressure, up. There’s no artificial sun, so Rose is likely in the kingdom's outer reaches, perhaps even an asteroid colony. The closest to New Constantinople as of when she last had access to the star maps would’ve been the Looking Glass, but…

She tries not to think about it.

She focuses on herself.

Rose is sat in a rusted shopping trolley, full of rags and old clothes. She's still wearing that heavy woolen coat, but thankfully has been dressed underneath it in clothes that don’t smell _too_ _much_ like a dumpster. Her hair, now long and ragged, is stuffed under a military cap with a large, bronze insignia on the front reading _'Anatolia'_.

Stood in front of her is a man.

No.

Stood in front of her is something that _looks_ like a man, but isn’t. Mouse brown twine for hair, poked into holes in its wooden skull, face painted bone white with rosy round cheeks. Dressed as a rebel soldier. In its hand is a syringe, empty, the needle snapped.

The end is stuck in Rose's upper arm.

“Oops!” the wooden man exclaims, jaw chuck dropping. “You weren’t meant to move! You've ruined everything! How rude!” The thing's mouth doesn’t move correctly as it speaks, words simply spilling from the dark hole as its jaw clatters away out of time

Rose parts her dry lips, reaches painfully to pull the needle tip from her skin. “What the _fuck_ …?” she groans, throat and tongue struggling to form proper syllables after decades of silence.

“Oh, she speaks! Sounds like a toad. How pretty.”

Her nails dig moon-shaped trenches in the flesh of her palms. Beside the strange wooden man-that-is-not-a-man, one arm slung sleazily around its shoulders, is Rose's horrible little prince. Unfortunately alive. Unfortunately in one piece. _Unfortunately with his innards intact._

“But Jonny, aren’t princesses meant to turn into _frogs_?” the wooden one asks, sounding oddly offended.

“I dunno. What say you, Rosie? Are you turning into a frog?” Jonny takes a drag on his cigarette. Rose hopes it gives him cancer.

“Why aren’t you dead?” It comes out weaker than Rose intends it to, halfway between a whisper and a croak. Her mouth is too dry; she’s thirsty for the first time in thirty years.

Jonny guffaws. “Me? Dead? Never. Take a lot more than a knife in the chest to put me out of commission, Princess.”

Rose thinks that 'knife in the chest' might be putting his getting gutted lightly.

She shifts in the old cart, tries to arrange herself more comfortably, but nothing is comfortable after you’ve been suspended in interface gel for a small eternity. Every sharp edge and point in the metal feels like it’s stabbing into her. Even the rust under her hands threatens to tear away the skin. She winces, falls back into her previous position, already exhausted.

“We’ve given you something to make the pain more bearable. Nothing too strong.”

To Rose’s side, sitting on a cardboard box that once would’ve carried fresh produce, is Nastya, all her limbs present and accounted for. Slung over her shoulder is a black leather instrument case.

“Who are you people? Why don’t you die? Why—” Rose's voice catches in her throat, chokes on her words. Coughs once, twice, three times. Every splutter and hack wracking through her body, violently quaking through her chest and up her esophagus. It feels like she's trying to regurgitate razor blades and molten metal“...why are you helping me?” she finishes pathetically.

“How do you know we’re helping you?” Jonny chimes in, face eerily sober. Jaw set tight. “We’re pirates, Briar Rose. For all you know, we could be holding you for ransom. Selling you off to the rebel army. Worse. You’re a super soldier; genetically enhanced for slaughter, _made for killing,_ even in this sorry state. Do you _know_ how many warmongers galaxies over would cut the fingers from their hand to own you?”

At that, Nastya kicks him, hard in the shin with a pointed toe. “Shut up, Jonny. The only warmonger here is you.”

“I didn’t know Jonny sold fish!” the Toy Soldier pipes up, stars in its eyes. Nastya's shoulders slump, she pinches the bridge of her nose. Her tolerance is wearing paper thin.

“Jonny was half correct, though. We _are_ pirates. But, lucky for you, we are your allies. For the moment.” She holds out a thin, pale hand; glancing at it, Rose notices the veins along her wrists and knuckles are almost black. Rose takes it in her own thin, pale hand. It's deathly cold, and it takes all of Rose's restraint not to gag at the foreign feeling of someone else's skin against her own. “My name is Anastasia. That one is the Toy Soldier. You can ignore the other one.”

“Oi!” – Jonny holds out his own knobbly hand. Rose doesn’t take it – “Jonny D'Ville. Capt—”

The Toy Soldier punches him square in the face. The crunch of hard wood impacting soft meat is almost excruciatingly loud, and five of Jonny's teeth clatter against the moldy concrete beneath them. “It's not nice to tell lies, Jonathan!”

“It’s not nice to _knock people’s teeth out,_ ” Jonny gurgles, stumbling over, hands poised under his face as though catching the blood now seeping from his gums. Spits a mouthful of it onto his shoes.

“But you’re not people! You’re Jonny!” the wooden man shoots back, eyebrows shifting a perfect forty-five degrees downwards.

Off to the side, Nastya clears her throat. “Anyway. We are the Mechanisms. I don’t particularly like the name, but that doesn’t make it any less true.” She steps behind the trolley and begins to push it forwards. The metallic clanking of the wheels on uneven ground once again assaults Rose's ears. Closer inspection of her surroundings reveal that they are in a trash-laden sidestreet, branching off a larger street lined with vendors and stalls and general foot traffic. Homeless folk huddle under annexes and awnings, in dark, damp corners; they weave through carts of belongings, dumpsters of rot and mold, people of all shapes and sizes sat on the cold pavers. Hundreds of eyes follow them, watching, boring holes into Rose from every angle. “We are immortal.”

Whatever Nastya says next reaches deaf ears. Rose has stopped listening. She is being assaulted by memory, memories she shouldn’t have, doesn’t want to have. Memories of the wicked old king and his _feasts_.

Feasts of meat. Goblets of blood, great silver trays of flesh. Cured, roasted, stewed, even raw. Some still alive. Withered grey lips sucking marrow from cooked and softened vertebrae. Crooked yellow teeth tearing meat from bone. Bathing in the blood and bile, slowly but surely granting himself that precious _eternal life_.

Rose feels sick. Sick _er_. But even Cole's immortality wasn’t like _this_. When wounded he would not heal. When killed he would not rise again. _This is different._ _This is impossible._

“That’s impossible.” Rose says as much, as Nastya guides them around a corner and into the crowded street beyond. Street preachers gesture at them as they pass, crooning holy smite and utter damnation. Trinket-sellers shout bargains their way. “True immortality doesn’t exist.”

“You really believe that, Princess?” Jonny quips, catching up to them with the Toy Soldier close in tow. He only sounds slightly out of breath. Flashes Rose a joyless grin; he has a full set of pearly white teeth.

“Everyone dies when killed. Some are just harder to kill,” Rose gives in reply, and she still believes it true. The pirate whispers something like _'fascinating'_ under his breath, only paying in half-attentions, too busy inspecting something stuck under his nails. “Where are we, anyway?”

At this, Jonny stretches his arms behind his head; his joints sound out a cacophony of cracks and snaps. “This, my love, is a colony of Three Bear Outpost. And, ask anyone, they’d agree with me: this is the shittest of the three. Always too cold here. Can’t stand the cold.”

Three Bear Outpost… Rose remembers it from her many hours spent studying star maps, memorizing positions and orbits and distances between things in order to better serve the King, better command and divide his garrisons of soldiers that all wore her face. It's an asteroid on the far reaches of the kingdom (they're further away than she thought; 330 million kilometers from New Constantinople at it's closest point in orbit), sectioned into three separate colonies: a vacation spot for the rich and relatively well-off, a mega-slum for refugees and criminals fleeing the kingdom, and a mining colony harvesting thermal energy from the asteroid's molten core to keep the other colonies stable. These days, the high concentration of rebels in the slum has lead to it falling into even worse disarray, life support systems and food imports often completely disregarded in favor of the resort colony. Rose finds herself agreeing with Jonny for the first time.

“We needed supplies,” Nastya says, to which the Toy Soldier proudly holds up a bulging plastic bag. “We don’t often have guests, let alone guests of your… mortality. This is the only place we could dock without getting shot at.”

The two pirates, wooden doll and crippled war machine traverse that wide, populous mall for what feels like hours. Hours of the unfettered noise of the crowd. Hours of getting dripped on constantly, ducking and weaving under waterfalls of ice-cold air-con water. Hours of beggars begging, foot-traffic trafficking, ships shipping off into the cosmos with earth-moving engine roars. Rose closes her eyes and drinks in the hum of _life_.

When she opens them again (everything is too aglow, too bright, too blindingly white), they are crammed into a tubular elevator heading upwards. _A long way upwards._ Jonny has somehow acquired a gun Rose recognizes as a type-four collection laser and is gesticulating wildly with it, to the visible dismay of the other elevator patrons, greatly exaggerating a story about a _horse_ _I knew once, lovely chap, really, if you ignore that time he bit old Newman's hand off, but the horse probably got better use out of it anyway, if you know what I’m saying._ The Toy Soldier is positively enthralled in the story, watching the man intently with its beady black eyes, and Nastya is cleaning her glasses. Scrubbing them. _Absolutely scouring them._ They crack.

The elevator dings an arrival, and they all file out like ants from a poisoned hill. Outside is a long catwalk, running high above the slums, shoddily domed and gravity-fitted (Rose only feels a little weightless). To the sides are hundreds of smaller walkways, like branches on a great metal tree, to each of which a ship is docked, more ships than Rose has ever seen in one place. All flimsily chained to flimsier-looking pegs.

Hundreds of starships, light, heavy and otherwise. Cargo ships, suppliers and couriers, freighters packed with people and products, people that _are_ products. Occasional hijacked ambulances or police vehicles. Even warships, some modified, some still bearing an army's insignia, gathered here from every far-off corner of every galaxy. There's a Vulture-Class Picker, designed for transporting bodies to and from stellar morgues and planets at war, thousands of mechanical claws ready to shoot from it and seek death at the press of a button. An Palladian Arachnid Voyager, usually a garrison ship on which entire battalions of soldiers are stored like products on supermarket shelves, drifting through space, waiting for the war to come to them. An immense black monolith of a ship, what was probably once a Transporter, designed to house inmates and other convicted criminals across the known universe, to the outer reaches, to serve their sentences and suffer serving them; modified beyond recognition into a moving colony of refugees and drifters.

“Which one's yours?” Rose asks Nastya as they wander down the docks, sometimes stopping to admire a particularly spectacular piece of engineering.

Nastya smiles fondly. She points at the Arachnid. “Her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jonny: it'll take more than a knife in the chest to kill me  
> me: sorry king you might want to sit down for this


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose gets a warm welcome to the Aurora. Plus half the Toy Soldier's face, jigsaw puzzles, and a very poorly named laser blaster.

Rose knows she's utterly fucked. Her stomach lurches, her mind reels, and a high-pitched ringing sounds in her ears. Alarm bells. Sirens. _That’s a warship fit for hundreds of people. How many of them are there? Is there really just a battalion of immortal soldiers floating through space?_

“So… there are more of you, then, on the ship?” she asks, throat rapidly turning back into sandpaper, and not because of her dehydration. Anxiety thrums a beat in her chest.

Jonny cackles, and it only fuels the nervous furnace inside her. “Oh, Rosie, there are _hundreds_ of us. _Thousands._ Most of us have tentacles, fangs, claws, beaks. Every single one of them ready to devour you whole at the slightest provocation. It's absolutely horrifying.”

“Oh, like when poor old Tim fell asleep in the cargo bay!” the Toy Soldier sing-songs, cheerful as ever. “Everything was such a pretty red color!”

“Honestly didn’t think he was going to come back from that one.”

Rose is white as a sheet. She’s seen Cole's armies, seen the horror wrought by the Rose Reds, by those that are almost human, but not quite. All that destruction and death and loss. _Thousands. What damage could thousands of_ him _do? Just one was enough to completely annihilate the royal defense grid._

Her face hollows further, jaw tightens, hands grip the sides of the cart like a vice as a thought occurs to her.

_They could end the wo—_

“He's joking. Sort of.” Even Nastya looks amused as the color slowly spreads, like an ink blot, back across Rose's cheeks. She lets out a ragged breath she didn’t know she was holding. “There are only ten of us, including my ship. But we do have an… infestation. Of, um. Well.”

“Octokittens!” the wooden man finishes for her.

Rose has absolutely no idea what that is, but has no time to dwell on it; the door at the end of the dock has crudely slid open for them with the piglike squealing of metal on rubber. The corridor stretching on before them is dark, made of khaki-colored reinforced alloy, illuminated only by faint, misty blue lights, set periodically into the floor. “Can you stand? Aurora doesn’t like having too much trash on board. She already has to deal with Jonny.” Rose wiggles her toes, in sequence, experimentally. Each tendon flexing and releasing feels like a pin being inserted into the space behind her knee, each synapse firing to move them an immense effort, even with whatever unholy concoction of pain meds the Mechanisms' had given her. Nastya makes a mental note to ask Raphaella about the physical taxes of long-term stasis. Maybe even Marius. “Alright. Doll?”

The Toy Soldier raises a ligneous arm and marches stiffly, robotically closer. “Ma’am, yes ma'am!” Instead of reaching in the cart to lift her, it simply rends the metal from one side with impossible strength and tosses it away. Places one hand under her knees, the other firmly on her shoulder, and boosts her up into it’s arms effortlessly. For Rose, touch-opposed as she currently is, such inhuman, non-flesh-and-blood hands are almost a comfort. She is relieved in not having to feel it breathe, feels its chest rise with each inhale. Relieved with how mechanical it feels.

Nastya leads the four of them over the threshold and deeper into the Arachnid's bowels. She walks with her arm extended outwards, fingers brushing the ship's interior walls; the ship almost seems to hum in response, a chorus of whirrs and low drones and the groaning of shifting metal. Rose goes to reach out her own frail arm, fingers noticeably trembling.

“Don’t. You don’t like strangers touching you, neither does Aurora.” It's Jonny, strolling beside Rose with his hands shoved into his pant pockets, meticulously chewing on the end of an unlit black-paper cigarette. “Then again, she _is_ the reason you’re here.”

“Hang on, this Aurora person… is your _ship_?”

“Yup,” he answers, loudly popping the _p_. “She's bio-mechanical. Kind of like you were, all plugged in.”

Jonny must notice the distress on Rose's face, the unasked question of _why the fuck are you making her suffer like that?,_ because he raises an eyebrow and continues. “Aurora doesn’t have a body, per se. She _is_ the ship. Never existed as anything else.”

“That’s cutting edge technology; even Cole's scientists needed a mind at the center of it all. Isn’t it strange to fit brand new mechanics into such an old ship?”

“Oh, Rosie, Aurora isn’t _new_. She's about as old as I am.”

“What, forty-five?”

Jonny throws her a Look as loaded as the laser and six-gun at his hip. He speaks in a slow, sarcastic drawl. “We stole her during the Great Cyberian Revolution back in 19000.”

“That's impossible—”

They reach a staircase, iron and pot rivets stretching further off into the hot, hazy darkness. It seems to get warmer the further down they go, steam shooting occasionally from vents or drains in the floor or between popped sheet metal. The Toy Soldier carries them down carefully, each step placed with great focus, so as not to jostle its cargo.

“I’ve never heard of this 'Cyberia'—”

Jonny plods down the stairs with a heavy gait. Even his footsteps are painfully obnoxious.

“And 19000 was over three thousand years ago—”

They reach the bottom step with a quiet but cheery 'yahoo' from the Toy Soldier.

“Briar Rose. Just because you’ve never heard of something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” At the end of the stairs is a tight-quartered, square room; the door leading onwards has a small window set into it, but it's so covered in grime and dirt and what looks strangely like pond scum that it's opaque. There is a panel set into the wall beside it, to which Nastya has simply pressed her oddly-silver fingertips to rather than entering proper unlocking credentials. “Cyberia existed, a long time ago. Nastya here is living proof of… well. Living-adjacent proof of that.” – Jonny looks slightly downcast as he says it, but continues to gesticulate wildly with his hands – “All records of it have been lost, mostly due to the planet being blown to kingdom come. Truly unfortunate, such a terrible loss, et cetera, et cetera. _But._ It did exist, and Aurora was made in one of its many factories, so many millennia ago. The whole planet was cyber-organic, you know? Fascinating place, shame the people were such utter fuckwits.”

“I take offense at that. Especially coming from you,” Nastya retorts, eyes shut tight in concentration as the grime-encrusted door slides open to reveal another, similarly dirty door. _They must really not want anyone coming aboard._

Rose doesn’t know that the Aurora's security system is so heavily equipped to prevent one person, in particular, from _getting back inside_.

“Oh, forgive me for my transgression, Queen Anastasia; you’re only a little bit of a fuckwit,” Jonny quips, voice high and mocking. He chuckles at himself, but it soon turns into a strangled cry as the piece of metal skirting he's leaning against glows ablaze with white-red heat. “And so are you!” He flips off a spot on the opposite wall.

Another door slides open. And another. And another. The final door is actually just a dark green curtain, ragged with age and wear and _moths_ , which Nastya pulls aside to reveal a large, round room Rose recognizes as the ship's central compartment. The fluorescent lights flicker and crack like glowsticks above them. “Briar Rose, welcome to the Aurora.”

As the Toy Soldier carries her inside, rambling in its very loud voice about _this is where we live! It's very nice here! Sometimes Aurora forgets to equalize the pressure in parts of the ship and we all get pulled apart like jigsaw puzzles! I sleep in the broom cupboard!_ Rose steals a glance at the lock screen by the entrance: it displays a single pink heart.

She decides not to think about it.

The room beyond is empty, aside from an oval table covered in playing cards, empty bottles of alcohol, and a pile of very nice and very expensive-looking jewelry most likely used as betting chips. That, and a small bench with a stove and sink set into it covered inch-deep in settled dust. Most likely never been used.

It looks abandoned, and the silence is too loud to be comfortable.

A shot rings out. A familiar electronic hiss of particles being attracted together and then spat back out at lightspeed. Rose gets spattered with both warmer-than-normal blood and wood chips. The shot has passed above Rose and almost dematerialized the top of the Toy Soldier's head, aside from a poof of chalk dust and dried paint and splinters now stuck into Rose's skin. It doesn’t seem to notice half its face has suddenly stopped existing.

From the angle it was shot at, it also hit Jonny square in the torso. Which is to say, said torso is now showered across the interior walls of the ship like a can of particularly-chunky red paint exploded. He popped like a balloon, and the meatier parts of him left are spread around at random. Party streamers of flesh.

A man is now standing on the disused kitchen bench, holding a heavily modified cyclotron particle cannon, still wafting steam from the trumpet-like barrel. He jumps down, flesh and bone shards squelching and crunching under weighted, angry footsteps. He presses the toe of his boot over an eyeball that spat itself from Jonny's head as he fell to the ground in a mushy, ruined heap of gore.

“You,” the man says, spitting the word like it's venomous. He crushes the eyeball with a _splat_ and a visceral _crunch_ of the corneal stroma as it snaps in two.

What’s left of Jonny winces. “Hello, Timothy!” his smashed throat exclaims, words trying to force their way around the mouthful of blood and chunk of still-sizzling gut that stuck there.

The man keeps walking towards them, each step getting louder and madder and _louder_ until eventually he kicks something shiny and silver across the floor. Jonny's corpse groans in pain as it bounces and skids, sparking orange flecks of heat up as it goes. It ticks like an old clock. Like a time bomb.

All the dead meat stuck to the walls and ceiling and floor shifts to follow it, as though magnetized.

“Make yourself at home, Princess,” Jonny's discarded tongue, teeth and esophagus say as they drag across the floor, spitting blood everywhere as the tongue struggles to loll over the syllables.

After that, he is silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so basically i want to hurt jonny dville.

**Author's Note:**

> hi again 👋  
> so there will be more chapters of this im a really slow writer and also life stuff but uhhh  
> stay tuned liars and thieves


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